Sessions for this sessiontype

Walk or ride your bike around Portland long enough and you'll come across unsafe sidewalk and road closures. To paint a clear picture of this issue, Oregon Walks and The Street Trust (BTA) ran a social media campaign collecting hundreds of photos and videos from citizens using a little tech sauce we whipped up. The pressure was on for City Hall to pass new closure requirements, which they did unanimously. This talk covers the people, the methods, and the open tech used to help move the needle.

Science Hack Day is a free-to-attend, open-source, worldwide, volunteer-organized event aimed at bringing together scientists, developers, engineers, students, and anyone else passionate or curious about science. The goal is simple: in 24 hours form a team and make something (fun, useful, nonsensical, anything!) with science. Hear from the organizers of the first Science Hack Day in Portland on how it was put together, just how awesome it was, and how open (science, source, hardware, web) played a vital part.

Open Data Kit (ODK) replaces paper surveys with smartphones. ODK tools are open-source and are primarily used by social good organizations to collect data quickly, accurately, offline, and at scale. ODK has been used to collect billions of data points around the world.
In this talk, Yaw Anokwa and Hélène Martin, two of the leaders of the ODK community discuss the problems that inspired ODK’s design, demonstrate the impact the tools are having, and describe how the Open Source Bridge community can contribute to an open-source, community-driven future for mobile data collection tools.

Virtual Reality is on the rise. We keep seeing new devices and frameworks who promises to get the job done. All of them work and are awesome. But all of them are proprietary, binds you to their ecosystem and their expensive hardware. Not to mention they are not cross-platform, don't run on other devices and the curve to learn the technology is too high.
What if we can get out of this walled garden? Build everything in open web technologies, run instantly in any device and still be able to enjoy similar experience? And can learn to build our own virtual world in a 45 mins session?
Meet aframe and Web Virtual Reality

The new space industry is expanding rapidly, with huge opportunities for open-source contributions. This talk focuses on the case study of Asterank, software that makes space data easier to access and explore. Its analysis and visualization tools have been used in government, private industry, and schools. The project has made public space data more open and usable for millions of people.

Learn how Meetup made the decision to create #Resist, a free network of over 1000 Meetups worldwide that anyone could organize with or join, and the questions we had to ask about how a private company could help self-empower the public in an actual way.

Debugging: the schedule destroyer, the confidence sapper, the mire in which thousands of working hours are lost every day. It’s time to stop staring at those four lines of code, desperately willing the solution to appear. This session is about the strategies that will steer you around bugs, tactics for dealing with them, and tools that can shorten a four-hour debugging session to five minutes.

The word "code" means different things to different people. In this talk, we explore cryptography and how it's evolved over time. We look at some key historical events and see how the art of encryption affected our lives.

By 2020 each person will create 1.7 MB of new data per second flooding us in 44 trillion GB of data! What’s this mean? From Uber’s “ride of shame” scandal to the role of Facebook’s news recommender in the presidential election we as developers must ask how we use data and what the implications are for open source software.

For many novice speakers, especially technical speakers, the hardest part of presenting is not figuring out what to put in but what to leave out. But what works for an academic paper doesn't work in a 10 minute presentation, and you risk boring your audience long before you manage to convince them of anything. This talk is intended to be a fun (and perhaps a bit silly) look at the science and the art of being convincing. I will cover how logical fallacies are used in propaganda, lying, and how you can use them to get your point across quickly. And don't worry, we'll also talk about how to do this ethically!

It's a fact of life--software breaks.
But all is not doom and gloom. How we detect and handle errors drastically impacts the quality of both our systems and our lives. Knowing what to track, when to page, and how to find system weaknesses is critical.

Making open source software translatable is easy, right? You just take out all the strings, put them in a translation file in your git repository, and start accepting pull requests. Simple! Well, not so fast. There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye, and if you take a quick and dirty approach you’ll end up with upset translators, complaints from users, and mysteries like “what is ١٢٬٣٤٥٬٦٧٨ and why does my code want to parse that as a number?”. Thankfully, there are open source resources and libraries that can take care of these things for you.

Futel has provided free public telephone service, telephone-mediated art, and live human interaction for several years, and was recognized as Portland's most prolific payphone installer of 2016. Now that we are finally living in the cyberpunk dystopia promised in the 80s, we are poised to seize this moment.

There's a lot that goes into a great open-source repository besides the code. How do you make your project easy for a newcomer to understand? What about easy to install, to test, and to contribute to? Big projects have whole teams dedicated to building robust releases, but you're just a solo dev with a dream.
Great news! You don't have to put your project on hold to study build engineering. Come learn a few simple tools that will put some professional polish on your personal project.

Grassroots activists have to deal with many challenges - including the tools they’re using. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source! This session will survey progressive and transpartisan grassroots activists’ needs and today’s solutions (including techniques that work for explicitly intersectional groups), look at some existing open-source offerings and how they could evolve to better meet grassroots activists’ needs, and identify future directions that could be even more impactful.

Let's be real: tech companies value engineering skills over most other skills, and it shows in both salaries and decisionmaking. This talk is about why this happens, why it's problematic, and how we can refocus importance on all the skills that make companies successful.

This talk is for you, the documentarian, developer, student, or community member wondering what you can contribute to open source and how to get started. Lucy Wyman discusses several ways open source projects need your help, what to look for in a project you're contributing to, and some first steps to making your first pull request.

This is the story of how focusing first on building a community of individuals who care about mentoring has allowed me to turn the idea of mentor matching for people learning to code into a multi-platform open source project.

This talk will hype several "homemade" open source video tools specific to the audiovisual digital preservation field built on broadly-used existing open source tools such as FFmpeg and mediainfo. We will discuss how these communities have grown to benefit the field of archiving and how we've grown to be able to give back to the main communities.

I feel passionately that women and epecially minority women in tech need mentors and that those already in tech have a duty to step up for them, even though it means getting out of their comfort zone. How do you mentor minorities? How do you mentor anyone? With kindness and respect.

Paying people for their work is radical, whether we're talking about open source contributions, second-shift diversity work, or even care at home. But giving people the resources necessary to make these community contributions is the only way to make our communities more sustainable.

Neurodiversity is the hidden diversity on our teams. Unlike obvious external markers, mental and personality quirks or invisible disabilities are not always easy for us to remember or adjust for. But sometimes diversity in this area is as important as any other.

On the surface, this story shares vignettes about my Mom. But its purpose is to increase awareness of human resources in technology, and overlooked pathways of young technologiests. "c. 1973 RCA hired her for the chip prototyping lab. Her new co-workers compared each other's crochet at lunch. A marathon week of late-night needlework bought her acceptance and promotion to supervisor. She told me stories about the ladies who wrapped wires for NASA a few years before, about women's centuries of fingers in technical fiber-crafts finally being noticed when it put men on the moon."

If we're going to be so religious about our standards and patterns, why not use religious tools to analyze and improve them?
Exegesis is a tool for nuance and understanding in the absolutes found on bikesheds everywhere, such as "replace all vars with const" and "arrow functions will save your eternal soul".

Conventional wisdom says that using the cloud means giving up privacy and control. But maybe crypto is actually literally magic and we can have our cake and eat it too? We're mostly not there yet, but let's talk about some of the ways that we're getting close.

The Open Steno Project is dedicated to the creation of open source software, hardware, and educational materials to bring machine stenography to the masses! Want to be a speed demon typist like the court reporters you see in movies? Now you can!

This presentation explores an ongoing project to incorporate digital repository building for community archives within a master's level library and information sciences classroom. The class taught under the pedagogical methods of service learning highlighted (and continues to highlight) the complex relationship between proprietary technology and archival 'best practices.' By reimagining this relationship, students were able to look at how open source tools and technologies better accomplished their desired outcomes to build a small-scale repository for their community partner, one whose narratives and materials were representative of feminist activism in the American South.

A great product has a built-in “unboxing” planned from the start. It never leaves customers thinking about how to do something or figure it out. The funny thing about the companies that make those product experiences is that they usually don't give the same treatment to their employees. Let's start thinking of onboarding as unboxing - and start thinking of our team members as humans!

Open source works best when the stakes are high, volunteers are pouring in and tons of stakeholders need to coordinate their resources, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the open source movement is transforming how individuals and institutions respond to disasters.

Staying safe in dangerous times is no easy task, especially when you're speaking the truth to power. Despite giving a voice to millions, the internet is now also a place of danger for those who try to use it to amplify those voices and make them heard. I'll be talking about by my experiences as a Nonprofit Security Advisor using Open Source tools and knowledge to help keep activists safe at the coalface.

Apps and websites routinely expose user information in service of social and interactive goals. But what happens when your user has a stalker? Many of these services will compromise the safety of users who are already at risk. Making things worse, some developers resist making changes, with justifications such as "If someone's in that much danger, they shouldn't be doing anything online," and "It's basically impossible to defend against a state actor."
This overview will help developers take the risk factors into account, and make development decisions that puts control back into the hands of the users. There's no way to perfectly remove the risk of going online if you're in danger, but people will go online anyway. Many more users at risk are facing technically naive attackers than are facing highly skilled attackers such as state actors.

This presentation talks about how the culture of technology is built around the cultural influence of those who've come first to the table. We'll look into how these narratives are made, what we can do about it, and the best ways these narratives can be challenged to make tech more open and accommodating to those on the outside.

After making the smallest possible transistors, scientists are developing new computation methods based on quantum mechanics. This talk is an intro to: what makes quantum computing special, how to build assembly-like instructions for quantum computers in Python and JavaScript, and how we could start encrypting data to avoid quantum codebreaking.

If you're on a budget but you need a website that doesn't suck and actually helps your business / organization / cause, I'll show you how to create one for under $1000 / year and a lot of sweat equity.

I'm not saying that you have to speak parentese to beginning software learners. They might be quite offended with you doing that, actually. What beginners often need, though, is not just to be set in front of a tutorial and told to come back when they're finished, but to have someone on hand to bounce questions off of or to talk them through problems and exercises so that they understand. Learners often pick up useful information by observing someone else at work using the language, but they can't just be there while you do things and learn it all by observation alone.
One of the best skills a librarian has that goes mostly unnoticed is that they're really great at narrating themselves to others. When demonstrating (sometimes for the sixteenth time) how to go through a procedure to obtain resources or run searches, librarians narrate what they are doing and why. When reading a book to tiny people, youth services librarians often ask questions about what the characters are doing or feeling, so that the tiny people can use both the text and the pictures to decode what's going on in the story. Key information about the story is often communicated visually in a picture book, and sometimes in complete contradiction to the text. By providing scaffolding through narration, the librarian provides context and reasoning for the actions they're taking. By asking questions at regular intervals, the librarian can check to make sure understanding is happening and adjust to include perspectives they may not have been taking into account before.
[...]
Talking and explaining things to your learners, and with each other, is the best way to help them learn. So if you get the opportunity to have someone shadow you and ask you annoying questions about what you're doing and why you're doing it that way, take up the opportunity. (And request it all gets documented. Trust me.) By talking through things with someone who doesn't have your expertise, you shore up your own knowledge and help someone get more of their own. That leads to literacy.

In this talk we will share why we decided create Refocus: our internally developed, self-service tool for monitoring computing systems. We’ll cover how it is extensible, describe its tech stack of open source components including Node.js, how it differs from other monitoring tools on the market, and how data is modeled in Refocus.

Browser automation based on the WebDriver standard is a key step toward web compatibility happiness and web developer happiness. In this session you'll learn how WebDriver is built into Firefox, why that makes the web better for everyone, and how you can get involved.

When you're writing software, fast feedback is key. The less you have to wait for your tests to run, the sooner you'll know whether or not your code is correct.
Ruby's two main test frameworks (minitest and RSpec) support several different techniques for testing only what you need for what you're currently working on, and nothing more. In this talk, we'll go through several of these practices for both frameworks, each more automated and awesome than the last.

Threats to personal information security and privacy are proliferating at a rapid pace, as are countermeasures based on open hardware. This talk will review the open hardware information security landscape, from personal password managers and cloud devices to alternative processors that are open all the way down to the transistor level, with a focus on how open silicon is poised to change everything.

Shared application servers are a vital building block for creating resilient information networks. Recent advances have made them dramatically easier to deploy and maintain in your home/workplace/community. Come for a tour, stay for a deep dive.

Duplication of effort, flawed funding models, and overall lack of project maturity has led to the failure of most open source projects in the international development space. In this talk, we'll discuss the plans of the Digital Impact Alliance at the United Nations Foundation to help increase those projects' maturity, quality, and reach -- with a goal of advancing an inclusive digital society using open source for the poorest places on the planet.

Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, famously said Red Hat would be the last successful OSS business. A dire forecast for the multitudes building their business atop of open source today. This talk is will dive into basic economic theory, how we’ve applied it at CoreOS, and ultimately describe what the current and next generation of open source business looks like.

To test, or not to test? That is the question. With limited time and resources there are only so many tests we can write and run. How do you determine what features of a new project to test? How do you know when a test is obsolete, or needs to be updated? What gets run per-commit, nightly, or weekly? What should you test manually? This talk will give you a framework for thinking about how to assess risk on a project and prioritize your

Flatpak is a technology by the GNOME Project that runs applications in a runtime and sandbox. This talk will explore the shift in how applications will be distributed in the future and how it is lowering the bar of entry of hacking on increasingly large codebases like GNOME.

People new to programming often have to work through barriers of language and learning in order to become proficient and being contributing. Does one of those barriers need to be one's math skills? Most schools and textbooks seem to think so. Let's discuss how we're introducing new developers to programming and whether we can make it more inclusive by removing the mathematics and replacing it with logic.

This talk will focus on describing a matrix decomposition technique called Singular Value Decomposition that conveys important geometrical and theoretical insights about linear transformations. This technique is not as famous as it should be given the range of applications from science and engineering.

Did you know there's a digital sound synthesizer in your browser? There is! It's called the Web Audio API and it's accessible from any JavaScript library or framework. I'll show you how I hacked Web Audio to make microtonal music in the browser.

Find out what it took to get Certbot's Nginx parser working, which is an... exciting... tale at the intersection of programming language theory, regular expressions, formal grammars, and the utter lack of these in a fine, aged codebase.

Come on an expedition into the dark corners of your project's code basement, deep in that directory everyone avoids because it's filled with spiders and booby traps and two mysterious old versions of JQuery from 2012 that no one even remembers using. Instead of getting exasperated by variables called data and poor command-query separation, learn to use code archaeology as a way to understand your organization better.

The Open Source Movement has a few defining traits, such as the the do-it-yourself, stick-it-to-the-man scrappiness; the caring about the people around us and their experience with the software or workplace; and, the way it is forever adaptable to the needs of the situation. Open source and unions have a lot in common - lets get started unionizing open source shops!

They have started up democratic copies of major platforms. They are building ways to better collaborate using the internet. They’re even talking about citizens buying out and protecting important internet communities like Twitter. Who are these people? They are Platform Cooperativists.

Many talks aimed at beginners to open source contribution assume that concepts like peer review and justification of intent are brand new. If you have ever experienced the thrills–and/or horrors–of a writing workshop, many ideas central to a successful pull request aren't that new at all. Let's talk about what experienced workshoppers and the field of writing critique can bring to your OS project.

Imagine being called for jury duty and then getting forced into a Java bootcamp run by two instructors who hate each other and won’t stop saying the opposite things. Worse, both instructors are inconsistent with themselves.

On a large open source project like Zulip, we were starting to see major productivity problems for the project, caused by longstanding limitations in GitHub’s permissions and notifications systems. Learn how we created zulipbot, an open source GitHub workflow bot written in Node.js, that patches these limitations in GitHub’s model and how you can use it to manage your own GitHub projects and organizations.

Proposals for this sessiontype

People often claim you can't schedule creativity, or blithely claim anyone can learn to be creative, without actually consistently doing it themselves. In this talk, Aaron Parecki will describe how (and why) he decided to take on not one, but two 100-day projects: creating 100 pieces of music, as well as making 100 IndieWeb improvements for 100 days in a row. Aaron will show how he was able to stay focused, prioritize, as well as the challenges he encountered along the way.

Science Hack Day is a free-to-attend, open-source, worldwide, volunteer-organized event aimed at bringing together scientists, developers, engineers, students, and anyone else passionate or curious about science. The goal is simple: in 24 hours form a team and make something (fun, useful, nonsensical, anything!) with science. Hear from the organizers of the first Science Hack Day in Portland on how it was put together, just how awesome it was, and how open (science, source, hardware, web) played a vital part.

Last year we had a great unsession on leadership and management. I would love to have that conversation again. As we all grow and experiment with leadership, how can we best learn from each other and raise each other up.

Basketball is second only to baseball in its rich variety of detailed data and analysis techniques. This project uses two techniques to reduce this complexity. The first, archetypal analysis, is an unsupervised learning technique that reduces the 18-dimensional box scores to a three-dimensional vector. The second, ternary plots, provides an elegant visualization for comparing players and teams. Using these techniques, I'll review the 2016 - 2017 NBA season.

There is always something new to learn in technology. We are always experts in one and beginners in another field. In order to learn successfully it’s important to have a mentor but it’s equally important to learn how to be a good mentor.

Remote workers make terrible partners, turning your humble sleeping space into a virtual stage for clients a world away.
Find out how a little empathy, a little ingenuity, and a lot of hardware hacking made me a better partner. No more accidental limelight.
Come for the demo, stay for the code.

How do you build JavaScript plugins that meet use cases you haven't thought of yet? How do you build them to scale? To adapt? In this talk, I'll explore some specific strategies for creating flexible, scalable JS plugins.

Releasing an open source project is easy. Push code on Github and (optionally) release the package on PyPI, rubygems, or npm, and distribution packages. How do you build trust into releases so that your users can trust your product? If your product is critical to someone’s infrastructure, trust is even more critical.

As an organization or project grows, it often becomes hard to keep track of the various community members, donors, and volunteers who are connected. The answer to this is the often used sales tool, a contact relationship manager (CRM). Lets look at a non-sales focused tool, CiviCRM and see how it can be combined with Discourse and various Drupal forms to create a contact funnel.

Interested in clustered or sharded PostgreSQL, but daunted by challenges of testing and deployment for multiple PostgreSQL nodes? Container infrastructure tools will make things much easier for you, and we'll show you how.

Do you use Ubuntu on your desktop, and want to make the desktop even more exciting? This talk will go over the basic ways to add additional features to the desktop, as well as showcase the current set of features you can utilize that will enhance the desktop you use daily!

Social engineering; it's a little more common and complicated than you might think. Wherever people live and work together, a social contract is formed. First theorized by Socrates and further expanded by Tom Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this system is so fundamental most people take part in it unwittingly. Social hackers can use this to their advantage - and by breaking the social contract, we are all left vulnerable to attack. In this talk I will discuss how social contracts develop and how hackers use this natural human behavior against their targets.

The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has long been criticized as not being a model open source project, and many articles have been written about the friction between AOSP developers and the upstream kernel community.
But things are changing, and one effort to improve things has been integrating devboard support into AOSP. This talk will cover that effort, and how having a place of shared interest helps foster collaboration between the product focused AOSP community and the upstreamed focused kernel community.

Government is huge, slow, and wasteful. You try to use its services, but they’re not doing what they were meant to. _You know_ how to make broken systems work. Join government to solve problems for everyone.
… especially under an Administration you oppose.

This talk is about "Why diversity is important part of open source communities culture. How to make your Open Source project and community diverse and inclusive, so that everyone feels good about joining. Different ways to be more inclusive and welcoming."

A thing that human brains do is generalize groups based on the individuals that they personally know who make up that group, either as examples of the group or as exceptions to the group. Thus, you get both #YesAllWomen and #NotAllMen. The easy way to beat this human tendency is to surround yourself with more than one person of that given identity or group membership....More likely than not, there's going to be one, maybe two, people in your immediate work circle who are part of groups that you're interested in recruiting more of into your profession or project. Usually. As we pointed out above, in some cases, you have one in your entire department who carry the entirety of their group identity with them wherever they may be going, without anyone else to be able to share the burden of being everyone's shortcut example of how that group behaves.

You maintain an Open Source project but your project isn’t succeeding in the ways you want? In this talk we’ll explore the different components of an OS project & how they work together. Afterwards you’ll be well-equipped with a ideas & strategies for growing, and nourishing your OS project.

I've been around Open Source my entire life. As a young FOSS dev, I've grown up looking at the community from the perspective that this is "my people". This talk looks at some of what I can definitively say are victories, a retrospective of two decades of lessons learned, and finally some challenges our community faces.

In this presentation, we will present the methodology used to create a harassment dataset and classifier, the dataset used to help the system learn what harassment looks like, along with a call to action for anyone interested to get involved with the project directly.

Have you ever joined a team where they just turned you loose on day one and expected you to come up to speed on your own? How did that feel?
In this presentation, we're going to look at onboarding from the perspective of a new hire. We'll go over what's worked and what hasn't worked for the teams I've been on. The specifics will be different for your teams, of course, but we'll discover some general principles together.
By the end of the talk, you'll be coming up with your own ideas you can apply to your team's onboarding process. By making a few simple changes, you can improve morale, boost productivity, and keep your fellow engineers around longer.

Open Source communities are excellent example of most diverse and globally spread work-space. Although, this is a major plus and feels amazing to work in such a diverse culture, but at the same time we need to face the challenge of accurate communication.

This talk is about text editors, IDEs and their evolution through the time. What does the modern day programmer prefer, the IDEs or the text editors? Also we will try to settle the war b/w 2 of the longest-lived applications, vi & emacs. Also you will hear about my favourite text editor.

The IndieWeb strives to create an alternative to content silos and the 'corporate web'. This is achieved through creating a single source of truth for your content and identity aka a personal domain. Let's explore the ramifications of this and answer any questions you might have together!

Do you use the same few passwords over and over? Is there a piece of paper with hard-to-remember ones somewhere? How about a file that lives on five different devices and is never up-to-date? Even the most secure passwords can be broken with a $5 wrench. Long forgotten websites are frequently compromised. Files can be stored in The Cloud, but is that really where such sensitive data should be?

You’ve built it, now you need to keep your users happy. Doing this without sacrificing your own happiness, and those of your teammates, takes planning. The intersection of monitoring and bother-the-humans is central to team happiness. We will go over this intersection and provide ways to navigate this humanely, and make your users happy.

So you’ve containerized your application, and now you want to deploy it scalably across a cluster. Maybe you’ve looked at Kubernetes but you can’t figure out how to use it. In one short session, we’ll teach you enough to get started.

Sustainably funding public goods is hard, just ask your local government. We know FLOSS benefits everyone, whether or not users contributed to its development. How then can we reach the world of everyone working on software they love while making a livable wage? We have been working on concept called 'crowdmatching' that creates a network effect through mutual assurance to fund the commons.

We’ve all been at the negotiation table, whether we choose to participate or not. It’s easy to avoid this short lived discomfort, but doing so can cost the average person around $500,000 in lost income over the course of their lifetime. Making the decision to negotiate is the first step - this talk will help with the rest.

While movies like Harry Potter and Iron Man taught us many things, the only lesson that stood out for me was "there are really cool ways to interact with things around us". A missing piece of the puzzle to convert our hands into wands is gestures. There has been an incredible rise in the number and types of proprietary products for virtual reality, augmented reality and smart home systems in the last couple of years. However, the corporate atmosphere and market competition has stymied the true potential of such devices and they often restrict users, developers and hackers to a particular platform. I believe FOSS, a place where collaboration over competition is the driving force, is the key to 'alohomora' the doors to the next level of HCI. I hope you'll join me as I talk about one step in this direction!

You always wanted to contribute to Open Source but you don’t know how to code (yet)? Or maybe you can but you simply want to contribute in other ways? The goal of this talk is to explore how you can use your skills and contribute to Open Source in ways that don’t involve writing code.

Open Source world is really fascinating and almost everyone wants to join and contribute to FOSS. Though many of us may know one or more programming languages here and do coding but, there are many people, who love to contribute in open source ,but are non-coders.

It doesn’t help that the industry puts some pretty unrealistic titles and requirements out there, like ninjas, rockstars, and sorceresses. Anyone heard anything like this? “Looking for a PERL Warlock, with 10+ years in Ruby, Linux kernel contributions, and experience doing isometric transformations in canvas. COBOL experience a plus.” In the early years, even the worst of us were considered wizards because we could do what others couldn’t, plain and simple. But now, people think of it as much more of a commodity position, but still expect us to have the proficiency and skill of a ninja. Somewhere along the lines, people stopped admiring rockstars and started expecting them. I am a yellow belt in two different martial arts (That’s one above I-Just-Started), I’ve played in a cover band, and still dabble in some slight of hand coin magic. This does not make me a ninja, a rockstar, or a sorcerer. Trying to live up to these standards is tough to say the least.

Security and Privacy are difficult enough concepts for adults, trying to frame them for children and young adults can feel impossible. In this talk, I will look at security and privacy topics, ways to protect against them and some examples of how to best frame this information for a younger audience.

While Rails is the undisputed king of Ruby web frameworks, it’s not the only option. Rack is a simple, elegant HTTP library for small Ruby web applications. This makes it ideal for microservices and applications where performance is a must.

Reproducible builds introduces best practices enabling bit-by-bit identical software builds. With identical builds, independent verification becomes achievable by individual developers, who are then able to publicly share those verifications to the community at large.

People in tech are prone to working too much and all the time, for their day jobs and volunteer projects. We work nights, weekends. We neglect family, friends and hobbies. If you want to learn about SELF care and how to practice it continuously, this talk is for you!

Surprisingly, most college students, even those enrolled in a CS program, don't really know what Open Source means. What does Open Source mean? What is the difference between each of the most popular Open Source licenses? What development tools and processes do you need to be familiar with to begin to contribute to an Open Source project? How do you evaluate an Open Source project to determine if it is the right one for you? How do you gain enough confidence to submit your first pull request to a live open source project?

I want to problematize keeping deprecated codebases around, and emphasize that mindless retention of data and code just increases our threat surfaces for attack and data corruption. Attackers in the future may be motivated by both ideology and money, and we are responsible for that.

In this sequel to last year's talk, Aaron Parecki will cover the current state of interoperable implementations of the well-established W3C standards you heard about last year. Many of these standards have grown this year both in number of implementations and their live usage on the web. In addition, Aaron will cover this year's emerging standards that have a few implementations and could use additional experimentation and feedback.

Abusive behaviour can have profound effects on personal relationships but it can also make open source contributing and office life miserable. For those stuck in a team with co workers who exhibit toxic behavior, going to work every day can feel like going to a battlefield. Knowing how to identify and how to respond to unreasonable behavior is vital. In this talk we will look at the ways we can improve our office and FOSS communities by recognizing, managing and gracefully removing this toxic behavior.

It starts small--a manageable codebase, a tight-knit team, everyone headed the same direction. But with success comes growth, and soon it’s hard to keep track of all those teams. Problems emerge in the gaps between what one team provides and another expects. Let’s look at how New Relic has faced these growing pains.

You’ve probably heard people say that programming is an art and a craft. Does it have anything to do with the traditional arts and crafts like cross stitching, knitting, or sewing? In this talk we’ll explore the intersection of traditional and modern crafts and what they can learn from each other.

Why does the Internet of Things seem so foreign to us as web developers? What protocol do my lightbulbs use? Why does it require a $4000 investment?
Learn how to use open standards like Multicast with open hardware like Arduino and familiar languages to integrate with the Things around us.

Activists around the world are experimenting with using voting to coordinate their decisions, and it's obvious that secure, open-source software must handle this form of communication. Yet typically such software is developed without involving "voting architects" who understand the math behind fair and unfair voting methods. Let's bridge this gap. Together we can build surveys and decentralized collaboration systems that bring democracy to very high levels of fairness, especially compared to the intentionally unfair use of single-mark ballots in governmental elections.

One of the things I want to know when I walk into a new organization is "how do things happen here?" This includes both "how do we talk about about things getting done" and "how they actually get done".

When working in complex systems, bugs become more than just one-line errors: they become stories and histories, manifestations of time and space. How do you deal with failure - not as an unanticipated event - but as a natural and expected outcome?

At Hack Oregon, we often need to geocode or reverse-geocode - translate an address to latitude and longitude or vice versa. There are public APIs for this, but most of them have rate limits or intellectual property constraints that impact their usefulness. So we built our own, using the Census Bureau TIGER/Line® shapefiles, PostGIS Tiger geocoder, and Docker. I'll go through the process, from downloading the data and filtering to deploying the final image.

When you love your work, when you are passionate, it is easy to push yourself too hard and burn out. Burnout is a real problem in the tech industry. We hear a lot about self care, but what is it? How do you do it? And what does it have to do with cats on the internet? In this interactive session, we will explore the subject together to find an answer to these burning questions.

Feelings are messy and uncomfortable, so why can't you just ignore them? Because research shows that emotional regulation skills have a significant impact on your job performance. In this talk you’ll learn how emotions are affecting your work by modeling them as an API and looking at their code.